Friday, October 05, 2007

Keep hope alive

Part of the reason I buried the good news (and it is good) so deep in recriminations in yesterday's post, other than the fact that I'm generally self-recriminatory, is that I hope the interview process has woken me up about a few things.

My time at the Old Job, the preschool, made me complacent and slightly obnoxious. I knew I was the best person there (not hard --- everyone else was very bad), and I knew for a fact that the Boss would never fire me. I'm not exaggerating. Very incompetent people there never got so much as a warning. The four years I spent there completely destroyed the professional approach to teaching that Volunteers of America instilled in me. I'm not blaming the shoddy atmosphere of the Job --- this is my fault. My personality took advantage of that situation, where I was a big fish that shone only because the little pond was so murky, and it corrupted me into thinking that I was something special.

I mean, I am something special, as we all are, but I took it too far and the wrong way. I need to revisit and embrace the idea of playing well with others again. I need to acclimatize myself to a certain level of conformity, a penchant for asking advice and taking certain things seriously, and for respecting the limits of others' tolerance for wise-asses like myself.

I may need to join some kind of club or group so that I can practice these skills. Luckily, I'm working at Brown, and I can try to see what makes the grade teams work there.

***

Saw the remake of The Fly with Epalg (so witty, so beautiful, so uninterested in me romantically). I didn't think the film was that great. I realize how absurd it is to attack this kind of movie for implausibility (DNA doesn't work that way), but the goofy-looking scientist guy couldn't have sold his inanimate matter transporter for a billion dollars? Come now. And so what if it turned organic matter inside out? Governments and military agencies are always looking for new ways to do nasty things to humans. Big bucks there!